Amazon keeps its position as the largest e-commerce company in the world. According to rough estimates, almost half of all scraping is targeted at Amazon pages. In the global market, Amazon is the number one site for scraping.
This great popularity also brings some challenges to any scraping attempts in this field. Without the right instruments and techniques, Amazon scraping can become extremely difficult and troublesome. In this article, we will see how to use a proxy for scraping Amazon and what you should pay attention to before scraping.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is one of the main methods of data harvesting and collection today. Basically, scraping can be described as the maintenance of information online. This can be done both manually and automatically, with the help of special software. Usually, web scrapers mean a bot or a special program that makes requests and stores the collected information.
In most cases, scraping can be done in two steps. First, the crawler collects needed addresses, and on the second, the scraper collects information from them. This technique can be used for many different purposes, but usually it is helpful for marketing, SEO, and HR tasks. This way, you can track prices, market changes, and other parameters online.
Some sites restrict data aggregation or try to block this activity. This type of obstacle can be evaded with datacenter rotating proxies or other kinds of IP-changing tools. Without proxies, your connection will be blocked after a short period of time. But proxies can allow you to evade blocks and other restrictions, like captchas and other blocks. With a setup like this, you can easily scrape eBay and collect data from BestBuy or Shopee.
What is Amazon Web Scraper Used For?
Amazon scraping can be used for a wide variety of business tasks. At its core, scraping from Amazon looks like collecting prices, information about products, reviews, and other data. Later, that data can be used for basic tracking of prices or product descriptions.
For instance, you can monitor the simultaneous launch of a certain product in multiple markets. In this manner, you can almost immediately identify any typos or errors in the prices or descriptions. Alternatively, Amazon scraping may be used to monitor the activity of competitors in your market.
You can collect information from Amazon using several main approaches. First, you can try to use the API for scraping for the most simple and intuitive collection of data through the graphical interface. With this method, you can see all the needed data and just choose which one you need to collect.
Other methods involve open-source programs created specifically for scraping. Here, you can use a headless browser and any of the libraries to collect all the needed data. Alternatively, you can use ready-made scraping software that can also be used with popular libraries for scraping. Both of these options are more flexible and customizable, so the choice will depend only on your personal needs.
Proxies are one of the main parts of any scraping-related process. Without them, both crawlers and scrapers will face restrictions and IP bans. Static residential proxies allow you to choose any needed location for a save and block free connection from any place in the world. Remember that large scale scraping projects also require a wide set of proxy pools to manage.
Good Amazon Proxy Servers
Proxies have three main categories to choose from. The first is called residential proxies. This type gets the IP address from the actual private residences. This means you will be able to use an IP address that will look just like any regular IP on your home computer. IPs in this case will be assigned to you by the ISP. Put differently, you can rest assured that these IPs won’t raise additional red flags.
The second type is called datacenter proxies. With this type of proxies, you can operate IPs from a pool that was assigned by the data center, so the chance of being banned is slightly higher. On the other hand, this type of IP will be one of the most affordable.
The last type is called mobile proxies. As the name suggests, in this case, your IP address will be formed on the mobile device. This type is very similar to a residential because of the IPs assigned by the Internet provider.
How to Choose the Best Type of Proxy for Amazon Scraper
When starting to use a proxy for Amazon, you need to check this guide and make sure that the quality of several factors meets your expectations. With the wrong choice, proxies can do even more harm than good, so this issue must be approached with particular care.
First of all, you need to check and monitor the speed of your proxies for web scraping. Fast response will be one of the main parameters that can guarantee the speed of file loading and scraping overall.
It is not less important to make sure that proxy security is in the right order. Quality security of proxies provides you with private and protected task management. This parameter includes server reliability. Reliable proxies are the key to successful scraping over long periods of time.
Then you can check the overall proxy service performance on different tasks. Make sure that the success rate of the proxy can meet your expectations. After this, you can compare prices and user experiences between your options.
Using Resident Proxies for Amazon Product Scraping
Amazon has a tendency to feed false data to flagged IPs. If your scraping was compromised and an IP was detected, you will get a false set of data in the end. Failing to figure this situation out can cost you a lot of time and money in the end.
Residential proxies for web scraping software can help you avoid any problems of this kind. Residential IPs are way harder to track and associate with bot work. With datacenter proxies, your IP can be associated with the center and banned fairly quickly.
With the residential option, you can also choose the needed location and perform any form of geo-targeted scraping. For example, you can collect shipping prices and other region based information.
How to Speed up Your Amazon Scraping With Rotating Proxies
Alternatively, you can add rotation and use proxies with ScrapeBox or with your private proxy scrape Amazon projects. This way, you can guarantee the best performance and fastest responses in large-scale data collection projects. For each new connection, the servers will perform rotating the IP address to a new one. With a setup like this, your request can be sent at high speeds without any additional checks or the risk of IP address blocking.
But only the purchase of the proxy pool can’t guarantee a successful scraping. Also, you need to figure out your ways around the user-agents problem, delays in randomization, and other issues related to tracking and detection. With all of these, you will be able to use web scraping to generate leads, collect data from Amazon, and any other professional task.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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What is the scraping of Amazon?
The scraping of Amazon can be described as the automated collection of data from Amazon pages. This can be used for SEO, marketing, and HR tasks.
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What kind of proxy is best for Amazon scraping?
Amazon scraping can seriously benefit from the residential proxy functionality. This tool can allow you to scrape loads of data without additional risk of being banned.
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How can proxies be used for scraping on Amazon?
Proxies are one of the essential parts of the scraping process. Without proxies, you will face constant bans and fake data in your results.
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How can rotating proxies speed up your scraping?
Rotating residential proxies can be a great tool for speeding up your overall scraping. These proxies allow you to use a new IP address for each new connection.
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